Saturday, March 03, 2012

Chong Qing Grilled Fish Restaurant, Singapore

I walked past this place a few weeks ago (18 Mosque Street #01-01, 6225-0087) and noticed how it was completely packed with people. Given all of the other Sichuan places around, I wasn't quite sure what made this place so special. But when I saw the grilled fish on a burner on everyone's table, I realized that it indeed looked interesting enough to come down here at another time to give it a try.

The good thing was that the fish pretty much tasted like it looked. Being covered in all of those Sichuan spices, one might think that it wasn't much more than your everyday shui zu yu. But this fish had the charred effect of being grilled on a fire first, almost making it a bit like ikan bakar but sitting in Sichuan spices - and a darned tongue numbingly concoction at that. The sodium was excessive, but that just comes with the territory.

The starters and sides were dismissible though; there were plenty of other places around that one could get much better ones at. As it turns out, these guys also run the haplessly named Let's Toss!. And just as with that place, these starters weren't anything special, but they did the job, I suppose.

These grilled fish were majorly popular when I was living in Beijing about 3-4 years back. I'm glad you can find them now in SG, but you'd probably need to have lots of herbal tea afterwards - the sodium level is amazing!